Princeton Papers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
Princeton Papers is a refereed journal published by Markus Wiener Publishers for the Near Eastern Studies Department, which is solely responsible for the content. Each issue is devoted to a single topic or theme under the supervision of a guest editor. Recent topics have included "Constellations of the Caucasus," “Culinary Approaches to Ottoman History,” “Sufism and Politics,” “The Ottoman Balkans,” and “The Islamic Middle East and Japan.” For descriptions of all seventeen volumes, please see the individual links below.
The Editorial Board welcomes proposals for thematic issues on any aspect of Middle Eastern Studies. Proposals for thematic issues should be addressed to William Blair, Managing Editor of Princeton Papers, at [email protected].
Requests for permission to photocopy or for reprints should be sent to Markus Wiener Publishers, 231 Nassau Street , Princeton , NJ 08542 ; fax 609-921-1140; http://www.markuswiener.com/ . Subscription orders should be sent to academic agents or the publisher. Single copy and back orders should be sent to the publisher.
Publications List
Co-editors Simon Wolfgang Fuchs (Ph.D. 2015) and Thomas Pierret (NES postdoc 2010–2011)
The first comprehensive overview of utopianism in the modern Middle East and North Africa
Studies utopian projects inspired by liberalism, nationalism, socialism, modernism, secularism, Islamic revivalism, urbanism, atomic energy, and artificial…
Yaron Ayalon, Ph.D. 2009
This book is a history of Ottoman Jews that challenges prevailing assumptions about Jews’ arrival in the empire, their relations with Muslims, and the role of religious and lay leaders. The book argues that rabbis played a less prominent role as communal and spiritual leaders than we have thought; and that the…
NES Ph.D. student.
Description
Makes available a wealth of primary material on the Muslim Brotherhood for the first time in EnglishFocuses equally on political debates within the Muslim Brotherhood as well as on the day-to-day lives and personal relationships of the imprisoned Muslim BrothersProvides a new perspective on what it meant…
Twenty-Five Women Who Shaped the Ottoman Empire is a tale of how women’s triumphs as well as their failures shaped a global society—not despite, but because of, gender.
The Ottoman Empire was among the longest-lived polities in history, stretching between the thirteenth and twentieth centuries across three continents, several…
Co-author Şuhnaz Yılmaz, Ph.D. 2000.
This book advances our understanding of security and its intricate interactions with geopolitics and the environment in Eurasia.
Norman A. Graham and Şuhnaz Yılmaz focus on Eurasia, where the energy-water-food nexus has emerged as a vital aspect of political economy and increasinglyas a decisive…
Co-translator and editor Yossef Rapoport, Ph.D. 2002.
Al-Bayān wa’l-iʿrāb ʿammā fī arḍ Miṣr min al-aʿrāb is an influential treatise on the Arab and Berber groups that inhabited the Egyptian countryside in the late medieval period. The work brings together al-Maqrīzī’s life-long preoccupation with the history of Egypt…
Editor Petra Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004
This volume in The Medieval Globe Books series surveys the distinctive but also shared rhetorical practices that characterize written requests for intercession, support, and patronage across many languages, cultures, and forms of interaction. Examples range from mundane requests to diplomatic…
Co-translator and editor Phillip I. Lieberman, Ph.D. 2007
A landmark new translation of the most significant text in medieval Jewish thought.
Written in Arabic and completed around 1190, the Guide to the Perplexed is among the most powerful and influential living texts in Jewish philosophy, a masterwork navigating…
Co-editor Philip Lieberman, Ph.D. 2007.
This volume is dedicated to Professor Joshua Blau, of blessed memory. The articles included therein, written by his students and fellows, all deal with the Judeo-Arabic language and its associated culture. Among them are articles dealing with language, lexicography, cross-cultural relations,…
Deniz Kılınçoğlu, Ph.D. 2012
The National Mind argues that understanding the power of nationalism requires probing into its cognitive and emotional influence on our everyday perceptions, feelings, beliefs, and behavior. Focusing particularly on the impact of canonical national narratives on thinking and feeling norms in society, it…
In 1894 Great Britain invited 'Abd al-Rahman Khan, the amir of Afghanistan, to England for a state visit. Then at the height of its imperial might, Britain sought to strengthen ties with the strategically important Afghanistan, which shared a long frontier, not yet a border, with British India. The amir's aim for the visit was to secure…
Co-edited by Petra Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.
The success of Islamic imperialism in the period from the conquests to the Ayyubid dynasty has traditionally been explained as purely the result of military might. This book, however, adopts a bottom-up approach which puts social relationships and local power dynamics at the centre of the…
Winner 2024 National Jewish Book Award (History category)
In September 1982, the Israeli military invaded West Beirut and Israel-allied Lebanese militiamen massacred Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Meanwhile, Israeli forces also raided the Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center and trucked its complete…
Caner Dagli, Ph.D. 2006
In Metaphysical Institutions, Caner K. Dagli explores the ultimate nature of the realities we call religions, cultures, civilizations, and traditions through the lens of a particular question often limited to religious studies, history, and anthropology, namely: "What is Islam?" The book is both a…
A panoramic history of the Muslim world from the age of the Prophet Muḥammad to the birth of the modern era.
This book describes and explains the major events, personalities, conflicts, and convergences that have shaped the history of the Muslim world. The body of the book takes readers from the origins of Islam to the eve of the…
Co-author Karen Bauer, Ph.D. 2008.
The first book to study households and patronage in the Qur'an and to show how Qur'anic theology, ethics and law seek to refashion these late antique social structures
Examines systematically all the Qur'an's verses on women, demonstrating how, over time, women become central to moral agency,…
Co-editor David S. Powers, Ph.D. 1979
The essays in Islamic Ecumene address the ways in which Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia and from sub-Saharan Africa to the steppes of Uzbekistan are members of a broad cultural unit. Although the Muslim…
Edited and translated by Louise Marlow, Ph.D. 1987
The 'mirror for princes' genre of literature offers advice to a ruler, or ruler-to-be, concerning the exercise of royal power and the wellbeing of the body politic. This anthology presents selections from the 'mirror literature' produced in the Islamic Early Middle Period (roughly the…
Uriel Simonsohn, Ph.D. 2008.
Provides the first comprehensive study of female power in the framework of the family during a period that was crucial for the formation of Islamic civilizationGives a comprehensive consideration of the place of women in the Islamization of the early and medieval Near EastAnalyses a broad variety of literary…
Co-editor Katharina Ivanyi, Ph.D. 2012
"Humanitarian Islam is an innovative concept that has begun emerging from the traditions of Islam in Indonesia in recent years. The most important contemporary Islamic organizations in Indonesia support it. Nevertheless, it seems to be unknown beyond the Southeast Asian context, despite its global…
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the Scholarship category, granted by the Jewish Book Council
Living with the Law explores the marital disputes of Jews in medieval Islamic Egypt (1000-1250). Examining the rich documents of the Cairo Geniza, a unique repository of discarded paper discovered in Cairo synagogue, the book…
Samuel Helfont, Ph.D. 2015.
The first book to use internal Ba'th Party files to examine Iraqi foreign policy and post-Cold War international historyOffers new insights into the evolution of the post-Cold War order and reveals why wars in Iraq became a central feature of global politics for the past thirty yearsHighlights previously unknown…
Co-translator and editor Nebil Husayn, Ph.D. 2016.
One of the most enduring sources of conflict among Muslims is the question of power and authority after the Prophet Muḥammad. This anthology of classical Arabic texts, presented in a new English translation, offers a comprehensive overview of the early history of the caliphate and…
Cole M. Bunzel, B.A. 2008, Ph.D. 2018
An essential history of Wahhābism from its founding to the Islamic State.
In the mid-eighteenth century, a controversial Islamic movement arose in the central Arabian region of Najd that forever changed the political landscape of the Arabian Peninsula and the history of Islamic thought. Its…
"This book aims to reveal Atatürk's detailed intellectual biography. The study is based on various local and foreign archive documents and period publications, especially his notebooks, the marks he made on the works he read and the notes he took, his speeches, interviews, and the books he wrote. By examining the intellectual…
Maha A. Ghalwash, Ph.D. 1997.
An alternative reading of the relationship between the state and smallholder peasants in mid-nineteenth-century Egypt
This book examines the rural history of Egypt during the middle years of the nineteenth century, a period that is often glossed over, or altogether forgotten. Drawing on a…
Abdelmajid Hannoum, Ph.D. 1996.
This book considers secularism and its narrative expressions. It shows how secularism is articulated and transmitted ubiquitously within state institutions and outside of them. Abdelmajid Hannoum does this by dissecting, in a series of essays, a variety of narrative forms, interrogating modes of their…
Translator Alan Verskin, Ph.D. 2010
In 1524, a man named David Reubeni appeared in Venice, claiming to be the ambassador of a powerful Jewish kingdom deep in the heart of Arabia. In this era of fierce rivalry between great powers, voyages of fantastic discovery, and brutal conquest of new lands, people throughout the…
Philip Lieberman, Ph.D. 2007.
In this book, Phillip Lieberman revisits one of the foundational narratives of medieval Jewish history—that the rise of Islam led the Jews of Babylonia, the largest Jewish community prior to the rise of Islam, to abandon a livelihood based on agriculture and move into urban crafts and long-distance trade…
Co-editor Jesse Ferris, Ph.D. 2008.
Table of Contents (Text in Hebrew)
Preface: A nation state in the 21st century / Yedidia Z. Stern, Shuki Friedman, Jesse FerrisAn introduction to Jewish nationalism / Hedva Ben-IsraelThe other N-word / Azer GatJewishness and democracy, Jerusalem and Athens: the need for a constitutionality of peace…Jesse Ferris, Ph.D. 2008
כמעט אף אחד לא רצה שפקיסטאן תהיה מדינה גרעינית. אבל יום אחד זה קרה. כמעט אף אחד לא רצה שצפון קוריאה תהיה מדינה גרעינית. אבל יום אחד זה קרה. כמעט אף אחד לא רוצה שאיראן תהיה מדינה גרעינית. אבל יום אחד...יום אחד נצטרך להתחיל לדבר על האפשרות שגם זה יקרה. נצטרך להתחיל לשאול מה על ישראל לעשות אם וכאשר איראן, ואולי גם…
Noah Amir Arjomand, Certificate in Near Eastern Studies 2010.
News 'fixers' are translators and guides who assist foreign journalists. Sometimes key contributors to bold, original reporting and other times key facilitators of homogeneity and groupthink in the news media, they play the difficult but powerful role of broker between…
Fred M. Donner, BA 1968, PhD 1975.
How did Islam’s sacred scripture, the Arabic Qurʾān, emerge from western Arabia at a time when the region was religiously fragmented and lacked a clearly established tradition of writing to render the Arabic language?
The studies in this volume, the proceedings of a scholarly conference,…
Michael Oren, Ph.D. 1986.
A thrilling literary fiction whodunit for fans of Delia Owens and Jaqueline Winspear.
World War II is raging overseas, but life remains painfully quiet on the rugged New England fishing island of Fourth Cliff. With most of its able-bodied male inhabitants away in the service, the island is now home…
Akel Isma'il Kahera, Ph.D. 1997.
The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power extends Foucault’s analysis, Of Other Spaces, and the “ideological conflicts which underlie the controversies of our day [and] take place between pious descendants of time and tenacious inhabitants of space…
Co-editor Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004.
During the period 500–1000 CE Egypt was successively part of the Byzantine, Persian and Islamic empires. All kinds of events, developments and processes occurred that would greatly affect its history and that of the eastern Mediterranean in general. This is the first volume to map Egypt's…
Co-editor Petra M. Sijpesteijn, Ph.D. 2004
In this volume amulets and talismans are studied within a broader system of meaning that shapes how they were manufactured, activated and used in different networks. Text, material features and the environments in which these artifacts circulated, are studied alongside each other, resulting…
Co-editor İpek Kocaömer Yosmaoğlu, Ph.D. 2005
This book introduces the reader to the past and present of Jewish life in Turkey and to Turkish Jewish diaspora communities in Israel, Europe, Latin America and the United States. It surveys the history of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic, examining the survival of…
Asad Q. Ahmed, Ph.D. 2007
Palimpsests of Themselves is an intervention in current discussions about the fate of philosophy in postclassical Islamic intellectual history. Asad Q. Ahmed uses as a case study the most advanced logic textbook of Muslim South Asia, The Ladder of the Sciences, presenting in…
Jessica M. Marglin, Ph.D. 2012
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, History Category
How a nineteenth-century lawsuit over the estate of a wealthy Tunisian Jew shines new light on the history of belonging.
In the winter of 1873, Nissim Shamama, a wealthy Jew from Tunisia, died suddenly in his palazzo in…
Aaron Rock-Singer, Ph.D. 2015
Salafis explicitly base their legitimacy on continuity with the Quran and the Sunna, and their distinctive practices—praying in shoes, wearing long beards and short pants, and observing gender segregation—are understood to have a similarly ancient pedigree. In this book, however, Aaron Rock-Singer draws…
Critical edition and introduction by Michael Lecker; annotated translation by Yaara Perlman, Ph.D. 2022.
Table of contents
Preface
List of Plates
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Idols in Conversion Reports
2 Mecca
3 Medina (Yaṯrib) (§ 110–117)
4 Idols and Treasuries
Notes on the Edition and the…
Usaama Al-Azami (Ph.D. 2018)
An original examination of the role of religious scholars in either supporting the Arab revolutions or advocating their repression. With particular focus on Egypt, al-Azami traces the public engagements and pronouncements of several prominent scholars. Considers how the engagements of counter…
Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law examines the main characteristics of the legal thought of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, a preeminent religious scholar jurist of Medina in the first half of the second century of the Muslim calendar (mid-eighth century CE). Numerous works in different languages…
Co-edited by Maria Dakake, Ph.D. 2000.
The Routledge Companion to the Qur’an offers an impressive and comprehensive overview of the formative scripture of Islam. Including a wide number of scholarly approaches to the Qur’an by both established authorities and emergent voices, the 40 chapters in this volume represent the…
Karen Bauer, Ph.D. 2008
A unique resource for scholars and students of the Qur'an and its interpretations, Islamic studies, and genderAdopts a groundbreaking approach for the study of women in the Qur'anBrings historical commentaries spanning twelve centuries into dialogue with contemporary perspectivesShowcases the intellectual variety of…
Edited and translated Eric Ormsby, Ph.D. 1981.
A key section from a classic work of medieval Islamic learning Provides students and non-specialists with access to an Islamic philosophical treatise Notes to technical concepts and obscure passages elucidate the text Full contextual and expository introduction to the text,…